Featured Toyota North American CEO to dealerships: "Stop delivering Mirai"

The Volvo group that developed the diesel fuel cell are intending it to be used as an APU for boats and long haul sleeper trucks. I wonder it there is any efficiency advantage to using it on a city bus for running the A/C and lights.

 

AG posted above - (thankyou) so the question is asked & answered - again
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meanwhile . . . . auto purchasers continue to vote with their wallets ;
Tesla Model S: Sales in 2015 set a number of new records | BGR

Let me articulate - as orenji points out .... even with gas costs at record lows ... and even with Toyota's (backfired) negative plugin ad campaign .... and even wirh CARB heavily stacking the deck to hurt plugins & favor C02 belching hydrogen cars .... even with Totota singing the praises of hydrogen & their lobby's lofty but empty / un-met goals . . .
a substantial ratio of Toyota's delivered hydrogen cars, can fit in a small section of one parking lot. Truly I hope you folks enjoy your experimental vehicles and I'm not trying to rain on your parade. However let's call a spade a spade.
voters are voting
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Living outside of SoCal and way across the country, I have no skin in this game but I think other than the scary idea of hydrogen fuel, fuel cell sounds promising only because we are still heavily dependent on coal for electricity. I don't know about you guys but my electric company reports that we are only at 10% wind power here. Obviously depending where you live, you might have more wind, water, solar or nuclear power rather than coal. We need to increase wind and solar electricity if we want to go all out on electric cars. I'm guessing more nuclear power plants will go away eventually due to aging similar to San Onofre. We also need to provide incentives for HOAs (Condos/Townhomes) and apartment buildings to build electric charging stations. Otherwise we need to keep looking into alternate fuels but those will all have growing pains of fuel cell if it isn't something that is readily available at your house (aka electricity).

 

10% wind is great...might be true for DC proper which has done a good job importing from PA, but I don't think MD and VA are anywhere near 10% wind altho maybe 10% renewables if they count all the things they like to count, including hydro

 

I'm actually in MD, DC metro. My bill tells me how much wind we are utilizing though.

 

Interesting wonder how they figure 10% (not Pepco right?)

 

Now that's Ironiq!

 

Fuel cells do have promise. It is the hydrogen that is the issue in terms of cost and speed of adoption, but fuel cells can powered directly by methanol, or indirectly with nearly anything else by an onboard reformer. The home fuel cell systems do so with natural gas, and there is a diesel powered one than can replace the APU on a sleeper truck or boat. They aren't ready for personal car use, but there is no reason to think getting them there would be harder than cheap renewable hydrogen and hydrogen infrastructure.

If the worry about coal electric is CO2 emissions, the average plug in causes the release of as much CO2 release as a 38mpg gasoline car on a coal heavy grid. Which is around 80% coal. The average new car, excluding trucks and SUVs, is around 27 to 28 mpg. So even on coal, a BEV is cleaner in terms of GHG emissions than what most of America is buying and driving.

 

This is a bit old, but everyone who runs public transportation buses is sure to have read this. 32x the cost per mile, after the initial purchase.

VTA finds hydrogen buses cost much more to run than diesel vehicles - San Jose Mercury News

The most glaring figure: Zero-emission buses - or ZEBs - cost $51.66 to fuel, maintain and operate per mile compared with just $1.61 for a 40-foot conventional diesel coach. They break down much more frequently, and replacement parts are next to impossible to order, according to the report.


Mike

 

VTA replaced those FC buses with diesel hybrids. Looks like management is happy as there are more of them now.

 

In Motor Trend just read a Honda Exec interview saying hydrogen was the future but far off as the cost of fuel had to come down and infrastructure had to be built, a cost that had to be shared across multiple companies and governments.

 

In the US, H2 could not be much cheaper in the sense natural gas feed is at $2. Probably under $1/egal to make low pressure H2 but all the compressors and everything is where the costs comes in, I would assume.

 

I figured it was the salaries of the hydrogen fool-cell advocates.

Bob Wilson

 

It will cost above the cost of natural gas. You got to pay for the water and energy to turn into steam. Then you pay to compress and transport it.

 

No think of it this way. NO matter how cheap and efficient it will never be 100% efficient.

Say you are making thousands of kg a day, its quite cheap to produce, but if you are only making 1200 kg/day (enough for 300 cars a day its gong to cost more) then you add on compressors and chillers and storage tanks, and if you amortize over 30 years maybe you can break even at $4/kg. But who would do that? I mean you need profit, so we are talking around $6/kg.

But that is not what they are building. They are mainly building things that can pump out 100kg-200kg/day and no one in the world thinks those stations will be around 30 years from now running at capacity. If hydrogen takes off you build high capacity stations. If it fails cars aren't going to pay. So we are probably at $30/kg unsubsidized, and after the subsidies and kick ins its free. If california was only paying for the stations and not the maintenance and risk then yeah probably $13/kg is about right, it will take that much money to just maintain the equpiment and pay for the natural gas, the trucks to distribute it, and the electricity. The fewer kg you pump the mor this costs per kg.

Think of it this way. That ccgt natural gas plant probably costs about $0.02/kwh to build, maintain, hook up to the grid, etc. By the time the electricity hits your home you are paying a lot more. Lots of this money goes to older plants, and saleries, and incompetance, and profit.

 

I just don't think there's a business case for the Mirai, now or any time soon.

 

...the "business" case is California gov't ZEV mandates, otherwise I agree.
But that's to some extent true for E10 ethanol and EV's too.
Also CAFE mandates play into.
We do not really have a "free" market, we have a free market as defined by the gov't.

The other CARB states need to fall in line with CA to make it more wide-spread. New York would like to follow CA, including the fuel cells.

 

We agree on the manufacturing cost but the problem is hydrogen is wicked stuff to handle and that drives the cost up. Yet the solution is so simple. Combine it into a molecule that can be easily broken into the parts:

• liquid ammonia - modest temperatures, modest pressures, existing infrastructure, dissipates on spill, modestly hazardous, dump the N{2} overboard
• methanol - liquid without pressure, more difficult reformer, dump CO{2} overboard
• hydrazine - liquid without pressure, dangerously hazardous, dump N{2} overboard

Liquefied ammonia is available in 'fly over' states which means even North Alabama. Any other proposed solution is FUBAR.

Bob Wilson

 

Ammonia can even burn in an ICE, so cheap ICE cars can be offered while the fuel cell costs come down. The pressure vessels for the fuel tanks still have space and weight issues.